Medals And Marketing

London’s Olympic Games.

What was billed as the biggest showdown of the London Olympic Games almost never came to pass. During the third leg of the morning qualifying heat in the four-hundred-metre individual medley, swimming’s quadrathlon, Michael Phelps, the great American merman, appeared to be treading water. “You can’t get a gold medal from the morning,” he said afterward, shrugging off his performance as energy conservation. The Hungarian Laszlo Cseh had caught Phelps during the backstroke portion of the race and then built a lead during Phelps’s leisurely breaststroke. Phelps began swimming again in the final leg, the freestyle, and nearly beat Cseh with a push in the closing metres—or so it looked to the naked eye. Lucky for Phelps, there are now electronic sensors in the walls, and the scoreboard revealed that his Gumby-like wingspan had, in fact, provided him with the first touch. He sneaked into the evening finals by seven hundredths of a second.

That close call was nearly the 2012 equivalent of Dan O’Brien failing to clear the bar in the pole vault at trials in 1992, and thereby missing out on Barcelona entirely, after months of Reebok’s ubiquitous Dan & Dave campaign, promoting a rivalry between two American decathletes for the unofficial title of World’s Greatest Athlete. The Dave Johnson to Phelps’s Dan O’Brien in our equation is, of course, Ryan Lochte, the free-spirited skateboarding enthusiast. Whereas Phelps is built for a life spent largely underwater, with an elongated torso, size-14 flippers, and what must be webbed fingers at the end of those squid arms, Lochte has the upper body of a gymnast, buffed by training habits that might seem better suited for an event set in the desert: flipping huge tractor tires, pulling chains. After Beijing, in 2008, where Lochte won two golds and two bronzes but was nonetheless accorded the respect of a prominent skeet shooter, he dedicated himself to dethroning his teammate. Phelps helpfully obliged Lochte’s efforts for a while, devoting much of the next three years to Vegas jaunts and posing for the bong paparazzi. He seemed not to let the fact that he was skipping practice stop him from maintaining his fabled high-calorie diet, either, and this spring, in the promotional run-up to London, while Lochte graced the cover of Vogue Phelps came clean to Details about what the tabloids have called his “fat period.” He’d since slimmed down, having finally found his motivation, but he showed up for his official team photo looking like a vagabond, unshaven and in need of a comb. It all came off as a kind of taunt: O.K., Ryan, I gave you the head start you need, now let’s do this.

In Beijing, Phelps did win gold in the morning. That’s how important swimming had become in the Phelpsian era. The organizers inverted the schedule so that the men’s four-hundred-metre individual medley could be shown live, in prime time, on the East Coast. Phelps delivered, and broke his own world record. “What Michael Jordan did for basketball is what I always wanted to do for swimming,” Phelps said recently, and in some respects he has succeeded. The Dan & Dave campaign arrived on the crest of track-and-field’s domestic popularity, in the era of Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Flo-Jo, and Carl Lewis, while the United States Olympic swim trials under Phelps’s reign have grown into an arena-filling spectacle, themselves televised over several days in prime time. This year, the trials attracted more than a hundred and sixty thousand people to Omaha, many of whom lined up to participate in a marketing gimmick called the Michael Phelps Swim Spa Challenge. Lochte, who had been dominating the world championships during Phelps’s Odyssey years, edged Phelps in the four-hundred-metre individual medley, and then ceded superiority in the next three events in which they swam head to head. Phelps, finding his stroke, appeared to regain momentum.

British pride would never bend to NBC’s will, as the Chinese had, so the big race was set for Saturday night, Greenwich Mean Time, and promised to be the hottest ticket of the week. Whether Phelps’s morning scare was to blame for the scattered empty seats as the start time approached or whether the new practice of following the Games on Twitter was threatening to supplant live attendance was hard to say. An m.c. tried to coax the spectators into making noise, but many of them—in the athletes’ section, in particular—were too busy holding their iPads up to film the pool. Phelps’s lousy preliminary heat had deprived us of the familiar camera shot where the two Americans collapse toward one another, across the same middle-lane divider, looking up at their times. As the eighth and final qualifier, Phelps would be swimming from an outside lane, exposed to the reverberating wake of the others. But surely if anyone was capable of summoning what swimming geeks call “outside smoke,” it was Phelps.

What we got instead of a duel was a “damp squib,” as someone told the BBC. Lochte dominated from the start, and Phelps proved that his sluggish morning routine wasn’t a function of overconfidence. In finishing fourth, he failed to medal for the first time since Sydney, when he was fifteen. No one had really expected him to sweep the board again, and he still had six races left to swim, but suddenly it was possible to imagine that he might not earn even the three medals required to surpass the Soviet gymnast Larysa Latynina as the most decorated of all Olympians.

“This is my time,” Lochte said afterward, wearing a diamond-encrusted dental supplement, and slyly undermining Phelps’s legacy by referring to him as “one of the world’s greatest swimmers.” I couldn’t help thinking that the real breakout star of the four-hundred-metre individual medley was a Qatari man named Ahmed Ghithe Atari—Atari the Qatari—who swam in the morning qualifying round. Atari never had a shot at qualifying for the evening session. That much was clear from the minute he dived in and failed to remain underwater for much more than half of the fifteen metres that swimmers are allowed before they must surface and commence stroking. At the end of the first leg, he trailed a nonentity from Barbados by a third of the pool’s length. By the backstroke phase, he seemed to be almost luxuriating in defeat. Had he not been indoors, you might have mistaken him for a restless sunbather. Here, I felt, was someone the cynical British hosts, with their dismissal of sub-regal pageantry, could appreciate: Atari was no upstart striver; he was just happy to be there. He had the pool to himself for the entirety of his last lap, and as he crawled to the finish he received a sustained ovation.

The first new world record at the Games was set some twelve hours before the official parade of athletes at the Olympic Stadium (“Usain Bolt has already opened a gap on his delegation,” one of the BBC commentators said), and before the film director Danny Boyle made a spectacle of the National Health Service. Its proud owner was a “blind archer”—one with very poor vision, at any rate—from South Korea. In his sport, the bull’s-eye is seventy metres distant. “When he looks at the target, apparently, he sees a blurry outline,” I heard a British journalist exclaiming over the phone. “It looks like paint dripping wet.” Long pause. “Yeah! Isn’t that great?”

I’d gone to Lord’s Cricket Ground, where the archery events were held, because I’d read a brochure suggesting that these might be “the Greatest Olympic Games in Archery’s History,” and because back in May I’d met an American contender named Brady Ellison, and he had proposed that we were in the midst of a quiet archery boom in the United States, owing to the popularity of “The Hunger Games.” “Archer shops all across the U.S. are sold out on everything,” he said. “They have to turn people away.”

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Ellison is twenty-three, and handsome in the manner of a rugged outdoorsman, with a scruffy blond goatee. He grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona and learned his specialty the way an ancient Olympian might have, by hunting elk, deer, and hogs with a bow and arrows. I was drawn to his folksy charm and to the seeming accessibility of his excellence, in contrast to the inhuman conditioning of the swimmers. “It’s a sport that anyone can do, so if you’re not the fastest and can’t jump the highest . . .” Ellison said, which set me to daydreaming. The Olympics are an inevitable occasion for playing what-if. What if I, too, wanted to compete for Team U.S.A.? Which event would be my best bet?

“I do cardio, even though I don’t really look like it,” Ellison said. “I started working with a nutritionist this year. Cut a lot of dairy out. Bread, starches. It’s really just meat and vegetables now.” Reporters dutifully jotted this down, until one of them remembered that he was talking to an archer, and asked why. “Because he said so,” Ellison said, meaning the team’s medical technician, and shrugged. “Now I’m hoping to live a little longer. My fiancée and I got engaged a couple of weeks ago. I’m wearing a promise ring.” He held up his left hand. I also noticed that he had the Olympic rings tattooed on his other forearm, such that they’d be on display for the camera whenever he pulled his arrow back.

Heading to London, Ellison was the world’s top-ranked archer, and, in anticipation of a star turn, he said that he’d spent the past year ridding himself of certain obsessive habits. “I’ve changed, and tried to be a role model for the kids,” he said. He quit chewing tobacco. “And when I quit chewing I switched to caffeine,” he went on. “Got over the nicotine in a couple of days, but then it was, like, coffee times fifty.” From caffeine, he moved on to sugar (Jolly Ranchers) and then toothpicks (a hundred a day) and, finally, sunflower seeds, which he deemed clubbable.

The brochure promised an archers’ rivalry worthy of Phelps and Lochte, calling Ellison “the Rafael Nadal of archery,” and likening his chief competition, the vision-impaired South Korean Im Dong-hyun, to Roger Federer. Im did not look as though he’d been cutting back on dairy or keeping up with cardio. He had a mop of reddish hair and the gait of a baker. This was merely the ranking round, to determine seeding. Sixty-four archers lined up simultaneously and fired away at more than twenty targets. “There’s a huge difference in how we shoot,” Ellison said. “I shoot Coach Lee’s system, which is biomechanically correct. Im Dong-hyun and a lot of the Korean guys, they shoot like a Korean. It’s a lot more push-pull—a very fast type of shooting.”

The whistling of the arrows was viscerally thrilling at first, inspiring Robin Hood fantasies, but then the excitement waned. Ellison has 20/10 vision, and told me that he can “see the ten line,” referring to the innermost of the two yellow circles at the center of the target. I certainly couldn’t see it, and had to take the announcer’s word—“Ladies and gentlemen, there is a very real possibility that a world record won’t just be broken but shattered here at Lord’s Cricket Ground today”—for the fact that we were witnessing history. Archery, I’ve concluded, is a made-for-TV event.

Ellison had his revenge in the team competition the next day, eliminating Im and the Koreans with a perfect ten on his final shot, on the way to a silver medal, the Americans’ first in London. But the ranking round was Im’s. He earned six hundred and ninety-nine points out of a possible seven-twenty, besting his own mark of six hundred and ninety-six. Afterward, I stood near a Korean-American reporter in the mixed zone, through which all Olympic athletes are required to pass while exiting. I was hoping that she might translate Im’s victory speech for me. But Im wasn’t interested in chatting. The Roger Federer of archery walked straight past, holding his right index finger up and wagging it vaguely in the direction of a video camera.

Brady Ellison wasn’t alone among the American Olympic hopefuls in thinking that he was due for some long-deserved attention, and maybe some more cash flow to subsidize his year-round training. The Games are a competition not merely among athletes from different countries but among cash-strapped sporting institutions and federations for a boost into mainstream respectability. Swimming hoards the gold, for now, and women’s gymnastics takes silver, but the competition among novelty acts for bronze is fierce. Even sprinting, which anchors the Olympics’ second week, isn’t immune to such anxieties: after Usain Bolt was disqualified for false-starting at the 2011 world championships, in Daegu, South Korea, there were desperate pleadings that the rules ought to be more forgiving, lest the sport’s popularity flag any further.

“If we were to win in London, that would put badminton on the map,” Howard Bach, a Vietnamese-American, said, glancing over at his doubles partner, Tony Gunawan. “That would erase a lot of the naysayers. They would slowly see: Hey, competitive badminton is indoors, not in back yards. No beers. This could be like the next Miracle on Ice.” Bach granted that the likelihood of this was not great—“That would be like asking Chile to win in basketball”—and, sure enough, he and Gunawan were eliminated after just two matches. (They may deserve medals anyway, for going down honestly, unlike the South Korean and Chinese women who, for differing strategic reasons, attempted to throw the same match at the same time, producing the racquet-sports equivalent of mutually assured destruction.) Badminton shall remain in the back yard, with beers.

My May encounter with Ellison took place in a Dallas hotel, where more than a hundred aspiring members of Team U.S.A. had assembled for a media summit, among them a triathlete who works for Ernst & Young, a skeet shooter who collects rare children’s books, the platform-diving daughter of the ex-Mets and Twins pitcher Frank Viola, and Michael Phelps, whose shadow loomed so large over the proceedings that it was sometimes difficult to have a conversation, even with an archer or a synchronized swimmer, without his name coming up. (“If somebody sees you in the airport, they’re, like, ‘Really? Do you know Michael Phelps?’ ”) After a couple of days in Dallas, I was ready to diagnose an epidemic of athletic Stockholm syndrome, in which gymnasts and divers and volleyball players and equestrians have internalized and, in some sense, accepted the mocking premise behind a lifetime’s worth of questions like “Why don’t you play a real sport?” When in doubt, they could at least point to Phelps, a rare crossover talent who can hang with LeBron and David Beckham.

Defensiveness is the Olympian’s default (“This is no cartwheel show”), and is combined with an optimist’s conviction that fortune is about to change. “It’s a really special time in the U.S. to be a decathlete,” a medal contender named Trey Hardee said, invoking Dan & Dave as both a cautionary tale and a source of inspiration. “Every year, there’s more and more exposure for synchro, which is awesome,” the duet-swimmer Mariya Koroleva told me. “Trampoline, it continues to grow,” the gymnast Logan Dooley said. “Just put it like that: the sport always continues to grow.” In the Olympic movement, every specialty is gaining ground.

The crass commercialization of the Games is a perennial topic of grousing. Good luck to anyone who brought a MasterCard or a Discover card with him to the Olympic Park, in Stratford, hoping to stock up on T-shirts featuring Wenlock, the one-eyed mascot. Visa only, please—and that goes for the A.T.M.s, too. So great was Visa’s investment in Phelps going into London that a couple of months ago the company’s head of global sponsorship marketing, Ricardo Fort, personally ironed a pink shirt for him in a midtown Manhattan hotel basement while Phelps conducted phone interviews to promote Visa’s Go World campaign, pausing occasionally to reload on calories with yogurt and granola. Phelps’s agent, Peter Carlisle, was on hand, too, examining a rough cut of the commercial that you may now have seen a dozen times, with a Morgan Freeman voice-over asking what would happen if lightning were to strike twice—that is, if Phelps were to dominate again. The commercial featured an especially boisterous spectator in Beijing who happened to be Phelps’s sister’s ex-boyfriend. “That could be a problem,” Carlisle said, and requested that he be cropped out.

Carlisle is not just Phelps’s agent but a more tactful version of Michael Ovitz in the so-called Olympic space. He heads Octagon’s Olympics and Action Sports division, by far the largest of its kind, which represents more than fifty competitors and personalities in London, including the gold-medallist gymnast Aly Raisman, Dan O’Brien, and Apolo Anton Ohno, the celebrity speed skater, who’s now working for NBC. “The moment people realize how funding works, it would be a major problem for the Olympic movement,” Carlisle said. “The billions of dollars that cycle through the Games, you’d be shocked how little of it gets to the athletes.” In other words, don’t pity the butcher who got busted by the London Organizing Committee’s paramilitary brand enforcers for hanging a sign with rings of sausages, and hold back the tears for Kate Middleton’s parents, who nearly ran afoul of trademark law when they advertised their party-organizing business with the slogan “Let the Games Begin.” Instead, pour one out for the contestants themselves, who’d surely be in favor of such protectionism—if only they could build a brand.

“A lot of these athletes will win a gold medal in these random events, and we’ll get many, many inquiries about athletes that want to go pro and talk to us,” Carlisle said. “There are so many athletes with great stories, but it’s very difficult to market them, and it’s gotten more difficult.” The more globalized the Games’ economy—Visa’s Olympic campaign went live in seventy-one countries, up from forty-five, in Beijing—the fewer and bigger the opportunities for capitalizing. “It’d be really hard to market an archer,” Carlisle told me, for example. (Sorry, Brady.) “Going into China, we had the opportunity to work with a Ping-Pong player from the U.S. with the last name Ping,” he added. “Whitney Ping! So I figured, like, if ever we’re going to have a scenario, it’s this one, you know? And—nothing. No traction.”

Carlisle and his colleagues were still debating whether to represent Holley Mangold, an irreverent twenty-two-year-old weight lifter with a compelling backstory (she played on the offensive line at her high school, in Ohio, and her brother, Nick, plays for the Jets) and a penchant for painting barbells on her fingernails but only an outside chance of competing with the burly Chinese and Russian women in her super-heavyweight class. “She ought to be marketable,” he said. “But the American marketplace demands gold.”

A beach-volleyball stunner Mangold is not. “I have a beautiful cyst growing out of my torn meniscus,” she boasted, in Dallas. “It looks really creepy.” But I was grateful to her and to her teammate Sarah Robles for their tutorial on the finer points of the sport—the variations of style within the two required lifts, the snatch and the clean-and-jerk. The split-snatch, for instance, is “super old-school and lame,” according to Mangold, who narrated as Robles demonstrated and looked a bit like a cheerleader hoisting leaden pompoms, with one foot forward and the other foot back. And the squat jerk, which Mangold demonstrated, by lifting and crouching simultaneously, and only then standing, is for showoffs. “Usually, you’ll see Chinese people doing it,” Mangold added—and, indeed, I did, when Lu Xiaojun set a new world record in the seventy-seven-kilogram weight class and received a standing ovation for his peacocking.

“We have faster start times than a lot of swimmers,” Robles added. “And higher verticals than volleyball and basketball players. We’re really athletes.”

The American marketplace may demand gold, but the British marketplace, beneath that veneer of indifference, turns out to be enchanted by any sheen at all. (Before the Games began, the novelist Nick Hornby asked that his fellow-countrymen be placed “under suicide watch.”) Taking a breather from one too many rides on a double-decker, I turned on the telly just in time to hear a commentator shout himself hoarse: “Great Britain have taken a bronze in the men’s team final! I can’t believe I just said that! This is absolutely extraordinary!” He was referring to gymnastics, an event category that I permitted myself to skip entirely, after seeing the kinetic video of Lynn and Rick Raisman watching their daughter Aly’s performance on the uneven bars.

I skipped the diving, too, out of solidarity with the nearly five thousand fans whose tickets placed them so high up in the wings of the Aquatics Centre that the ten-metre platform was invisible—obscured by the low stingray swoop of Zaha Hadid’s ceiling. Doubles canoeing presented a real dilemma: do you go flat water, and catch the Belarussian Bahdanovich brothers, or white water, and see the Slovakian Hochschorner twins? In the end, I took Mayor Boris Johnson’s advice, and went to Horse Guards Parade, near Buckingham Palace, in search of “wet otters”—Johnson’s euphemism, in an op-ed for the Daily Telegraph, for the women of beach volleyball.

There seems to be some confusion about the beach-volleyball uniforms. I got a call from my wife, in New York, who was amused by what she thought of as the creative attempts by some women contestants to show as much skin as possible without actually wearing bikinis. No, it’s just cold. Notice the spectators, many of them wearing windbreakers and carrying umbrellas. These are the first Games in which the authorities had the decency not to require women to wear bikinis, and, furthermore, to enforce a Brazilian-style maximum on the bottom half. Members of the U.S. men’s basketball team may have been disappointed when they showed up at Horse Guards Parade, on Monday night, to cheer on the two-time defending champs, Kerri Walsh Jennings and Misty May-Treanor, who had availed themselves of long sleeves. But I was there earlier that afternoon, to scout the U.S. team’s chief competition, the Brazilians Juliana Silva and Larissa França, and it was only partly cloudy. The air temperature was sixty-six, the sand—delivered in thirty-five hundred truckloads from Sussex—was seventy-nine, and the bikinis were on. “Every team can decide how small they want them to be,” Ilka Semmler, of Germany, the Brazilians’ opponents, said. “If they want to sell sex, that’s fine. But that’s not our intention.”

It is indisputably the intention of the event’s organizers—as though it were a cathartic release from the repressed discomfort of watching ninety-pound girls on the uneven bars. The Olympics are nothing if not a convention of salesmen. In the match that I watched, there was a technical timeout called, and a different group of women in swimsuits occupied the court to wriggle around atop beach balls to the Katy Perry song “California Gurls”: “Daisy dukes, bikinis on top / Sun-kissed skin so hot / We’ll melt your popsicle.”

“Meanwhile, back on center court, it’s Brazil versus Germany!” the announcer reminded us, with a wink, as play resumed. In the next set, with Brazil well on its way to victory, there was an official conga line.

The address I was given for Greenwich Park, where the equestrian events are being held, was on Romney Road. Mitt himself had left town by the time Rafalca, his wife’s fifteen-year-old Oldenburg mare, made her Olympic début, and he had distanced himself verbally as well, informing Brian Williams, “I have to tell you, this is Ann’s sport. I’m not even sure which day the sport goes on.” Even so, it is safe to say that no athlete in London has done more to attract attention to his or her sport in recent weeks than Rafalca. Her event is dressage, which is a little like figure skating before the invention of double axels, Salchows, and camel spins. Neither speed nor strength seems to be a necessity. There are marks for movements like “extended trot” and “collected walk.” The choreography is rigid. Discipline and presentation are all.

I liked Rafalca when I first saw her trotting out to the center of the ring. She’s a handsomely light shade of chocolate, with a vigorous black shock of a tail. She points well, and looked quite good at the piaffe, a form of strutting in place, with high steps. After several minutes in the spotlight, though, she seemed to labor. Her pirouette to the left looked slow and mannered, and her pirouette to the right began with a bit of a lurch and an over-large first step. I heard a pair of heavy snorts during a brief cantering interlude, and then noticed that the background music that happened to be playing was a little New Age-y, rather than the standard classical fare. There was something off about it.

If Rafalca suffered any bias from the judges on account of her celebrity, I couldn’t discern it. Her highest marks came from a Dane and her lowest from a Dutchman, with the American judge somewhere in between. Total score: 70.243 per cent.

“Is that good?” one reporter asked another, down in the mixed zone.

“I’m just writing down numbers.”

“Doesn’t sound very good.”

“I think I actually know less about this than about badminton, which I was at yesterday, for that controversy.”

Soon Jan Ebeling, Rafalca’s rider, appeared, to take questions on the horse’s behalf. “I think she’s peaking just at the right moment,” he said. “I think it really ended up being a good thing for the sport.”

Bob Bowman, Michael Phelps’s professorial coach, is a horse enthusiast, too, and a couple of years ago he recommended that Peter Carlisle watch the movie “Secretariat,” as a kind of swimming allegory. “I was alive at the time”—1973—“but I don’t remember anything about it,” Carlisle told me. “Just the name. And you know he’s the best, but you don’t really understand it.” Carlisle began summarizing his recollection of the movie for me. “He was the underdog in the Kentucky Derby against his rival—whose name I don’t remember,” he said. “Then he goes to the Preakness, and still the favorite is this other horse, and Secretariat just nudged him out. But the dig was that he wasn’t going to be able to run the longer distance in the Belmont, and all the while the other horse’s trainer is yapping, yapping, and the rivalry continues to the point where you really think Secretariat’s the underdog. So he gets to the Belmont and blows the other horse away by, like, twenty-something lengths—still, to this day, the fastest. No one’s even come close to running that lap in the same time. But I can’t even remember the other horse’s name—who, if you took away Secretariat, was the fastest horse that had ever run.” He looked at me. “Do you know who Secretariat beat?”

Leaving aside the confusing bit about underdog status, the implication was that Phelps is Secretariat and Ryan Lochte, with his dental grille and his boastful designs on claiming the sport’s mantle, is the also-swam. What had seemed foolhardy about the analogy on Saturday night, after the debacle of the four-hundred-metre individual medley, came, by Tuesday, to make some sense. Lochte’s star turn—his “time”—was proving short-lived, as he suffered a letdown in the four-by-one-hundred-metre freestyle relay and the two-hundred-metre freestyle races that followed, winning only a silver instead of two more golds. What’s more, it emerged that even in his finest moment Lochte had been beaten, by a girl! This was the sixteen-year-old Chinese dolphin Ye Shiwen—Yeah, She Wins, for those keeping score on Twitter. Ye’s final freestyle lap in the women’s four-hundred-metre individual medley took just 28.93 seconds, to Lochte’s 29.10. Compounding the humiliation, Ye played it Bruce Lee-cool on social media, unlike Lochte, who had been tweeting in spurts and with what sometimes seemed the voice of an OMG tween (“Good morn LOCHTE NATION!!! thanks for all the great support! U guys are the best. How is everyone??”). “The first day’s competition is finished,” Ye wrote. “The score is satisfactory.”

The Games had their first doping alarm, and their first dose of geopolitics, as some in the American swimming faction led the way in crying foul, and the Chinese and other athletes responded with indignation. On Tuesday night, after Ye had passed her first battery of drug tests and then set another Olympic record, in the two-hundred-metre individual medley, a Chinese reporter in the mixed zone explained the nature of her countrymen’s anger. “It’s because the U.S. has Phelps, and China has so many people, so why can’t they have just one like him?”

The Ye controversy threatened to overshadow the Americans’ own teen heroine, seventeen-year-old Missy Franklin, a Phelps-like prodigy who began snorkelling before her third birthday and had sponsors clamoring for her endorsement at fifteen. Franklin has thus far maintained that she intends to swim in college, instead of turning pro. She just finished her junior year at Regis Jesuit High School, in Aurora, Colorado. “She called at three-fifteen in the morning, from France,” D. A. Franklin, Missy’s mom, said on Tuesday evening, standing near the pool entrance with her husband, Dick. “She said, ‘Momma, did you hear about the shootings in the theatre?’ She said, ‘I’m just so scared.’ I said, ‘What are you scared about?’ She said, ‘I’m just scared to be here. I’m scared for my friends. My friends were all going to it. I want to know what theatres they went to and I can’t reach them now.’ ” Franklin dedicated her first gold medal, in the hundred-metre backstroke, to the victims.

If there is to be another Secretariat in American swimming, Missy Franklin, with her perpetual smile, is the most plausible candidate. By resisting the lure of sponsors and prize money, she had already forfeited more than her parents make in a year. D.A. and her husband have met with Carlisle, but she remains Missy’s agent for now, having recently taken a leave from her job as a physician to manage the many requests for her daughter’s time. “This is all unfamiliar territory,” she said. “We’re not naïve, either. There’s going to come a point, perhaps, where we just say, ‘Missy, a lot of people don’t ever earn this in their whole life.’ I don’t know. It’s hard. It’s hard being parents.”

But the night belonged to Phelps, who redeemed his week with a strong finish in the four-by-two-hundred-metre freestyle relay to capture his fifteenth gold and nineteenth medal in all, topping Latynina—with more to come. An hour earlier, he’d seemed to wilt again, surrendering a large lead in his strongest event, the two-hundred-metre butterfly, to the lunging South African Chad le Clos. In so doing, he gave us the gift of Bert le Clos, Chad’s father, whose tearful interview with the BBC (“It’s like I’ve died and went to heaven, and whatever happens in my life now is plain sailing. It’s plain sailing!”) actually ennobled the parent-cam genre. Chad called beating Phelps “the greatest moment in my life,” and Phelps himself even managed to look happy, in coaching the victor on how to mug for the cameras. After four Olympic Games and countless Visa commercials, he’d learned to lose with grace. ♦

Ben McGrath began working at The New Yorker in 1999, and has been a staff writer since 2003.